Lionel Richie: Watching Nicole struggle was heartbreaking

The music icon and his ex-wife Brenda Harvey informally adopted Nicole when she was just two years old, making it official when she was nine.

Nicole had a turbulent few years in the early noughties, which saw her arrested on numerous occasions and checking into rehab in 2003 after being detained for driving with a revoked license and possession of heroin.

For Lionel, it was almost unbearable to watch.

"Nicole became a huge star herself in [TV show] The Simple Life with Paris Hilton. She fell off the rails and she got into drugs and the wrong kind of friends and was arrested for possession of heroin and went into rehab. That’s a fairly cataclysmic thing for any father to have to watch his beautiful, young daughter go through," he sighed to Piers Morgan in an episode of his Life Stories series, which airs tomorrow evening.

"I got a phone call and she said: 'Dad, I need help, I don’t want to be the third one [of my friends to die].' And I said: 'I am with you' and I cancelled the tour. I said: 'Me and your mother', who didn’t get along that well, 'Me and your mother are checking into rehab with you.'"

Luckily Nicole has left her personal problems in the past and is now leading a successful career as a designer, as well as being a mother to kids Harlow, seven, and Sparrow, five, with husband Joel Madden.

And Lionel continues to croon his way through music after having won over ladies around the world with tracks such as Endless Love and Three Times a Lady. In fact, the second has helped the star seduce many women, but he isn't often intimate with the sound of his own voice in the background.

"Absolutely not. You can’t even get into scandal with this. Let me tell you this, now wait, in the early days of Commodores maybe it was in the background," he laughed, referring to his band.

"It would be Three Times A Lady. I’m no fool, because that was our first worldwide hit."